Lecture Series: The Long Duration of Russian Imperialism - Russian Literature and Empire

This interdisciplinary lecture series is dedicated to Russian imperialisms from different perspectives.

29.06.2022
Prof. Dr. Harsha Ram: "Russian Literature and Empire".

Lecture Series "The Long Duration of Russian Imperialism".

With the Russian government's military attack on Ukraine, a new war has been raging since February 24, 2022, and has been intensifying day by day since then, putting millions of people in danger and forcing them to flee.  The lecture series will focus on the multi-layered and enduring Russian imperialisms, their changing content, ambitions, influences, encounters and historical entanglements with, for example, Ukraine, but also with other former post-czarist and post-Soviet countries. Interdisciplinary perspectives on the entangled histories of Russian imperialism and the countries and societies involved in these imperialisms are placed in larger transregional and transcultural contexts.

There are lectures that take a bird's eye view of Russian expansionism and those that focus on individual regions that developed under Russian dominance. This concerns from issues of democracy, nationalism, political economy, human rights, gender practices and LGBTQI* struggles. Thematically, the lecture series is divided into three sections: tsarist imperialism, Soviet imperialism, and post-Soviet imperialism and socio-political developments in post-Soviet spaces.

The lecture is aimed at students from the departments of Humanities and Social Sciences, but is also open to all interested parties. The interdisciplinary conceptual orientation of the lecture series will give students and members of the University of Kassel as well as citizens of Kassel the opportunity to get to know the multi-layered topic of Russian imperialism from different perspectives. The lecture series will also open up the space for discussions on the challenges that the war against Ukraine poses for our common life.